I might make a game inspired by this >> http://io9.com/5362912/the-city-is-a-battlesuit-for-surviving-the-future

which was the slogan of an urbanomancer char I played in a short unknown armies campaign.

here taken literally: a game in which characters are visitors from the future, perhaps pursuing one another or being pursued. And they take the mightiest products of the 21st century civilization - our mega cities - peel them off the earth's surface, and 'strap them on' as battle suits hundreds of kilometers high.

I assume that statistics about contemporary cities- their populations, growth rates, size, major industries, trade flows- would determine game stats for the cities as power armor.

I might set the game so that chars must engage with the city/ inhabitants to unlock cities as suits.

or something...

Sort of reminds me of the original Macross saga, with the city built into the giant transformable battleship, the SDF-1.

That's an ambitious concept. Good Luck.

Ambitious. You might want to take symbolic approach to account for the infrastructure and social programs in the city.  If a city has an excellent recreational baseball team, the city might be better at clubbing opponents, for example.  The better the roads, the faster the city can move.

I see the City and the Skin here, but I am uncertain if you have described any use of a third element?  The desert or the edge?  Curious how it would be included.

Staggeringly cool. What would be extra awesome is if there were the possibility of games with in games as dudes fight across the cities that are themselves fighting. Maybe infiltrators can mess with the infrastructure of the Sao Paolo megasuit - blowing up power substations and plugging stormwater channels - to cripple the suit's wearer in battle.

Vulpinoid wrote:
Sort of reminds me of the original Macross saga, with the city built into the giant transformable battleship, the SDF-1.

That's an ambitious concept. Good Luck.

Jason wrote:
Ambitious. You might want to take symbolic approach to account for the infrastructure and social programs in the city.  If a city has an excellent recreational baseball team, the city might be better at clubbing opponents, for example.   The better the roads, the faster the city can move.

I see the City and the Skin here, but I am uncertain if you have described any use of a third element?  The desert or the edge?   Curious how it would be included.

Jason wrote:
Staggeringly cool. What would be extra awesome is if there were the possibility of games with in games as dudes fight across the cities that are themselves fighting. Maybe infiltrators can mess with the infrastructure of the Sao Paolo megasuit - blowing up power substations and plugging stormwater channels - to cripple the suit's wearer in battle.

few more thoughts:

Visitors from the future/ elsewhere trying to locate nemesis partly inspired by the films Hidden (1987) and Terminator (84). The motivations of the visitors/ sojourners (escape, capture, conquest, preservation etc) may each give some kind of mechanical effect or have different victory conditions.

initial ideas for how urban data translates to suit stats:

Population 2000: strength or energy
Size: reach
Pop Density: toughness or damage points
population growth rate1965-2000: speed (get speed bonus if city ranks in top ten in airports, ports, electronic data)
Wealth/ per capita income: resources? number of movements? 

I like the idea of players describing/ drawing what the city looks like once 'put on' - perhaps visual concept has some mechanical impacts

I'm using Arjen van Susteren's Metropolitan World Atlas as my main data source. I haven't figured out how the demographic data translates to stats. Here are the world's 30 most populous metro areas as of 2000

city                         Population (millions) Size (km 2) Pop density Growth 65-2000 (%) Wealth/ income (thousand pounds)
Tokyo- yokohma 33.2                                 5258                 6312         58                                 30.1    
Seoul-incheon         22.9                                 1191                 16725         518                                 11.9
New York                 21.8                                 11518         1760         34                                 19.2
Mumbai                 20                                 738                 19377         325                                 2
Mexico city         19.6                                 1476                 11687         213                                 8
Sao Paulo         17.7                                 1981                 8945         221                                 9
Kobe-osaka-kyoto 16.9                                 2720                 6224         29                                 30.7
Los angeles         16.2                                 2874                 3353         116                                 17.5
manila                 14.1                                 1943                 7277         386                                 6.8
cairo                         14                                 482                 27490         204                                 2
london                 13.9                                 2263                 4172         8                                 37.2
Calcutta                 13.9                                 1036                 13456         124                                 3
New delhi                 13.7                                 583                 17677         376                                 2
shanghai                 13.6                                 549                 16393         25                                 4.4
Buenos aires         13.4                                 2771                 4042         74                                 5
djakarta                 13.3                                 2590                 5135         202                                 6
beijing                 13.2                                 518                 14479         71                                 3.7
moscow                 13.1                                 981                 10064         98                                 7.8
Rhine-ruhr         11.1                                 1823                 4171         113                                 22
karachi                 11                                 932                 10764         424                                 2
Rio de janeiro         10.8                                 1166         9271         104                                 8.7
tehran                 10.7                                 290                 25359         435                                 4
paris                         10.6                                 2721         3545         32                                 25
istanbul                 10.4                                 1269                 8219         440                                 5
lagos                 10                                 145                 41752         567                                 2
tianjin                 9.9                                 127                 36394         125                                 5
chicago                 9.5                                 5499                 1629         34                                 15
Hong kong         9.2                                 52                 104,345         179                                 16.7
nagoya                 8.8                                 2823                 3130         31                                 25
dhaka                 8.6                                 83                 39554         1047                                 1.5